Hollywood has long fetishized Japanese gangsters, with their full-body tattoos, missing pinkies and harems of buxom groupies. Ever since Sydney Pollack’s “The Yakuza” in 1974, the colorful mafiosi have provided regular fodder for directors including Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino.Curiously, studios are again abuzz with a flurry of Japanese mob projects. Warner Bros. is developing “The Outsider,” about an American prisoner of war who joins the yakuza after World War II. Robert Whiting’s 1999

Viewpoints Nov. 26, 2013

As a Catholic and long-term resident of Korea I feel a need to respond to the remarks made by Catholic priest Park Chang-shin as reported on the front page of your paper on Nov. 25.The statement attributed to Park, “What should North Korea do if South Korea-U.S. military exercises are being carried out (near) the problematic NLL? North Korea needs to open fire. That was the shelling of Yeonpyeongdo Island,” spoken at a Catholic Mass held on Friday, has no place in the Catholic church, and in fac

Viewpoints Nov. 26, 2013

The Obama administration has cut an interim nuclear deal with Iran that gravely worries some of America’s strongest allies in the Middle East and even gives pause to some of President Barack Obama’s allies in the U.S. Senate.It’s easy to see what Iran gets out of this: a reprieve from crippling economic sanctions worth some $6 billion to $7 billion in cash.It’s more difficult to figure that Iran views this as the first step toward giving up its nuclear ambitions. Iran will stall some of its deve

Viewpoints Nov. 26, 2013

Should Korea continue to pursue its goal of becoming a regional financial hub? The question is being raised as the nation takes stock of what has been achieved for the past 10 years since it unveiled this aspiration.In December 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun disclosed a road map to make Seoul a financial hub in Northeast Asia by 2020. One key objective was to attract the regional headquarters of the world’s 50 largest asset management companies to Seoul by 2012.Since then, an array of measures has

Editorial Nov. 25, 2013

As winter approaches, public concern about the toxic smog blowing in from China is growing. The smog in China gets worse during the winter as people burn coal for heating. The smog contains a high level of “particulate matter,” which refers to extremely small pollutant particles floating around in the air. These particles include nitric and sulfuric acids, organic chemicals and metals. Their density is diluted as they cross the West Sea, but meteorologists say up to 50 percent of them reach Kore

Editorial Nov. 25, 2013

While there may be some bruised feelings and anger left behind in the aftermath, the so-called “nuclear option” unleashed Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats hardly seems worthy of its destructive billing. It means only that from now on in judicial nominations other than those for the Supreme Court, the majority will no longer have to muster 60 votes to win confirmation.That Senate Republicans immediately compared the change in Senate rules to Obamacare ― a non sequit

Viewpoints Nov. 25, 2013

The need to respond effectively to climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, particularly more so in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. While no one typhoon can be directly linked to climate change, rising global temperatures and warming oceans provide the conditions that fuel these kinds of monster storms. A recent analysis of the economics of climate change in the East Asian countries of People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea, Japan and Mongolia delivers two clear mess

Viewpoints Nov. 25, 2013

Historians may look back at Typhoon Haiyan as a turning point in disaster journalism and the politics of climate change. For the first time, an extreme-weather catastrophe in the tropics has shrugged off its “made in Asia” label and gone global.Coverage of storms, floods and droughts usually begins and ends with war-zone style reporting about dire conditions on the ground. The raw numbers of the dead are interwoven with tragic personal histories of survivors who have lost homes and loved ones. T

Viewpoints Nov. 24, 2013

“Syd Field died today,” I tell my son.“Who’s Syd Field?” he asks.“He came up with a theory that there was a formula that was used in every great screenplay, and if you followed that formula, then you could write a good screenplay.”“He made writing math?” My son squinched up his nose in disgust. Writing is a pleasure for my son and math is not. And there lies the rub with Syd Field.Here is the man who put the first book of film anatomy on the desks of every wannabe film maker. He showed us a diff

Viewpoints Nov. 24, 2013

One lesson that Korean corporations learned from the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis is that you need money set aside to survive a credit crunch. They have since steadily increased their cash holdings to build a buffer against unexpected financial shocks. So when the global economy was thrown into turmoil in 2008 due to the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis, major Korean corporations were not affected as they had already accumulated enough retained earnings to avoid any cash crunch. Yet they have gon

Editorial Nov. 22, 2013

Prosecutors have found evidence confirming the allegations that the National Intelligence Service was systematically involved in the parliamentary and presidential elections last year. Investigators probing the state spy agency said they have newly discovered more than 1.2 million Twitter messages disseminated by NIS agents in the run-up to the two important elections. The 1.2 million messages were mostly retweets of 26,550 original texts. Investigators suspect that NIS agents had used “Twitterb

Editorial Nov. 22, 2013